In optical communications systems, an optical signal may be modulated with digital data in order to transmit the data over an optical transmission path. Different parameters of the optical signal may be varied to represent digital data (e.g., the binary digits “0” and “1”). According to one type of modulation, known as differential phase shift keying (DPSK), the binary digits are indicated by differential phase transitions in the optical signal. For example, a phase change in the optical signal may indicate a “0” and no phase change in the optical signal may indicate a “1”.
One problem associated with optical communication systems is maintaining the integrity of the data being communicated, particularly when optical signals are transmitted over long distances in long-haul communication systems. Accumulated noise contributed by many different sources in a transmission path may cause degradation of the signals and may cause difficulty in differentiating between the binary digits (i.e., the ones and zeros) in a data stream.
Forward Error Correction (FEC) is a technique used to help compensate for this degradation. FEC is essentially the incorporation of a suitable code into a data stream at the transmitter. The code is used by the system's receiver for the detection and correction of data errors. The transmitter receives a data stream and encodes the data stream using an FEC encoder that introduces some redundancy in the binary information sequence of the data stream. The receiver receives the encoded data and runs it through an FEC decoder to detect and correct errors.
Two types of decoding have been used to recover the information bits in the receiver, hard and soft decision decoding. According to hard decision decoding, received samples are compared at the output of the demodulator to an optimal threshold and hard decisions are taken and fed to the decoder where the errors are corrected. For example, a bit is “1” if the signal level exceeds a predetermined level and a bit is “0” if the signal level falls below the predetermined level. According to soft decision decoding, the received samples may be quantized in a multiple bit word and then fed to the decoder. The multiple bits provide “soft” information representing a confidence level in the received data, which may be used to perform more reliable decoding than in the case of hard decision decoding.
Although hard decision decoding has been used to provide some error correction in DPSK systems, existing DPSK systems using hard-decision detection may still experience an unacceptably high number of bit errors at some low signal to noise ratio. The system performance can be improved by employing a system and method of forward error correction decoding using soft information that is capable of improving the detection and correction of bit errors in digital signals, particularly in a DPSK system or similar system.